Are you being trapped in a vicious cycle of investing and earning over and over again through your e-commerce business but still not getting your target results?

The competition in the digital and e-commerce world has grown tremendously and is expected to grow tougher over the upcoming years. Every day, there are hundreds of new creative ways for online business owners to acquire more customers and harvest higher revenue. Luckily, working in a thriving industry can definitely be a benefit.

One of the most effective and highly recommended business techniques is the marketing automation. Digital marketer and SEO Wizz, Neil Patel, described it as “the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration, and campaign management, that would have otherwise been performed manually.”

Aside from that, it has been proven to be a good avenue to launch marketing efforts faster, generate leads and accelerate revenue. For instance, CentricsIT, an online one-stop-shop for numerous technology solutions once experienced a marketing decay, not until one of their newly-hired employees explored email marketing automation. The effort delivered a 59% boost in leads and generated $1.5M with the system implementation. This is just one of the numerous success stories about the said innovative strategy.

So if your answer to the above question is a burning “Yes”, maybe you haven’t reached out to marketing automation just yet.

Customer Journey

Gaining their interest through engaging content and captivating visuals

Collecting leads using sign up forms

Using consistent key messaging so leads could convert easier

It’s important to understand our prospects behavior thoroughly; from being just a prospect to converting them to a paying customer, and everything in between, would really be advantageous in crafting the necessary efforts when implementing marketing automation. This generally helps you comprehend the factors that may contribute to customer churn.

Lead Generation and Lead Scoring

The sure and safest option in translating your visitors into bonafide leads is to offer them personalized and relevant content that would lead them to trust your brand in the process. And once you’ve succeeded in that aspect, the best way to nurture their experience is to have an effective lead scoring model. Through the database, marketers may customize the client’s overall brand experience that’s specifically based on his/her customer journey stage and interest level, which may result in an improved sales quality.

Segmentation and Personalization

Marketing automation allows marketers to segment their audience based on certain criteria like demographics, buying behaviors, interests and amount of money he/she is willing to spend for a product/service.

By grouping them into defined categories, you can effectively craft a more targeted approach as well as personalized marketing strategies for your respective clients.

Workflows

After you’ve segmented your database, it’s time to create workflows that can help you develop leverage towards your subscribers and keep in touch with them.

Workflows are being used to automate repetitive actions and standardize marketing process. There are the so-called action-triggered workflows that basically influence the content of the email. For instance, a newly signed-up client may automatically receive a welcome email, and then several follow-up emails soon after. Event workflows are also quite popular especially during special occasions like Christmas and birthdays. Expect to receive automated emails before, during and after those special events.

Other sample workflows are free trial sign-ups, abandoned cart, product delivery, lead nurturing, and more. name a few.

Data Analytics

Not only does marketing automation help you to efficiently reach prospects but it also allows you to generate data for competitive analysis without working too hard. It tracks accurately all possible statistics about your implemented marketing strategies and campaigns.

With this feature, entrepreneurs, especially those who own small businesses, can easily act upon specific efforts that didn’t work and nurture those that triggered positive results.

Testing

With an improvement that’s backed up by research and statistics, there’s definitely no space for second thoughts.

In general, the goal of marketing automation is for businesses to succeed, that’s why it also helps you test your business strategies that gear towards providing a better customer experience.

Conclusion

Though resources for promotions are unlimited, there is still absolutely no quick fix. Investing in an automated marketing technique would allow you to focus mainly on the excellence of your content and relationship building efforts that guarantee an increase of ROI soon after.

Written By

Luda Greko is a Digital Content Manager for ActiveTrail, a leading provider of professional-grade email marketing and automation software for growing businesses. By day she writes for top online marketing sites about email marketing and marketing automation, and by night she is a lifestyle blogger and a social media enthusiast.

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Comments

2 Comments

Matthew

September 17, 2018 at 10:33 am

As I am into b2b business, hence I found the article very useful about the different benefits of marketing automation tools. With the help of the software, it’s easy to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration, and campaign management.I have tried using a number of marketing automation tools, but I found Aritic PinPoint to be the best, as it allowed me to use comprehensive campaign module by reducing the need to build segments in a different interface. The additional feature of avoiding the creation of the lists and segments outside of the campaign module causes a decrease in errors.